10/13/09

Hello fellow moneymakers, it's been a while! I've been busy working on a batch of mini sites lately in anticipation of online shopping season. Mainly I'm tinkering with Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger blogs and some self-hosted websites. Two of the biggest moneymaker holidays are quickly approaching us with Halloween and Christmas 2009. Preparing for these can be fun (or burdensome) depending on how you choose to go about making money with them. I'm here to drop some food for thought and let you know what I've been working on lately.

With Halloween the main thing people will buy online is their costumes, masks or accessories to go with them. You could create Hubpages or Squidoo lenses, or even infobarrels related to this, to make money off Adsense, or by selling Amazon products. I would have recommended eBay products as well, but with their new pricing system, I'll take Amazon (more on that later). Anyhow, Halloween is one potential way to profit online, if you get cracking and create sites. I found through a few of my blogs where I talked about some Halloween related topics, that I received traffic for unrelated topics that involved costumes. So from there, those costumes were made into full blog posts, have seen some sales. You don't really need a Halloween site per se, as you can find many ways to tie the holiday in with your blog theme. Cooking, photography, entertainment, etc etc, all have some sort of relation to the holiday. Mixed bag blogs, fashion, music...the list continues...be creative and keep checking Google Hot Trends for some ideas on upcoming Halloween stuff.

Christmas is really your big time to profit. Some people start their shopping months ahead of time, while most wait until around mid-November, and particulary for Black Friday / Cyber Monday. It's key to have some product-oriented sites set up for these holidays, and even afterward. I downloaded Jackie Lee's Squidoo Christmas Cash Blueprint here, which is a nice little e-book to get you started. She prefers Squidoo, and there's some pros and cons to using them. The best is the fact that Squidoo shares the sales with you through their Amazon modules at the commission rate of 4%. Compared to Hubpages you might not always get that, because of their revenue split of 60% / %40 impressions. Of course there are ways around that..

With Hubpages you can stick your Amazon Associates link into the hub you write up, as long as you don't go spam crazy. I'd recommend two total Amazon links, perhaps one in the top and one at bottom. I learned that too much Amazon on a Hub will make Ezine articles not accept an article linking to that Hub. So tread carefully when you create your Amazon hubs or lenses. Squidoo is more lenient on allowing more affiliate links, but to a limit. The advantage to Hubpages over Squidoo is they seem to rank better in some cases with Google and other sites. I've found Squidoo always brought me a lot of Yahoo search traffic. It really depends on which keywords or product you're targeting.

Blogger blogs are another option for Amazon Associates products. Consider creating a Christmas holiday style blog as recommended by Jackie Lee from Internet Marketing Strategy for Moms. She suggests a blogger blog as a way to build links to your Squidoo lenses (or Hubpages) to get them ranked for the terms. Of course you could also just make the Blogger blog full of Christmas gift products with Amazon Associates links to the items.

Of course all of this got me thinking, why not have both a Christmas and Halloween website, self-hosted. Netfirms sells domains for just $7 for the first year, and Hostgator is my preferred hosting service, with GoDaddy probably second. Yes, these one-time holiday sites would exist year round, but they would make you bigtime profits if done properly. By that I mean, finding the right keywords for your URL that aren't too competitive. Otherwise, your self-hosted sites might just get lost in a sea of millions of Google results for Halloween and Christmas. But having these two huge holiday sites could prove valuable in terms of link power down the road, as well as in making money off the shopping done for these holidays.

If you want more insight on how a guy is making tons of money with Adsense via Amazon sites, check out 6 Months Later: $300 Daily w/Adsense (Lessons Learned) by XFactor over at Warrior Forums. Just don't get too caught up in reading all of the posts, as it's a HUGE forum thread, but contains very valuable insights.

Also, your holiday or Christmas site could really be a product review site, which if you think about it could make you money year round, as people are interested in all sorts of products that Amazon sells. You'll start to realize you might own a lot of stuff that other people are looking up online. Furthermore, eBay Partner Networks allows you to use code on self-hosted Wordpress or static websites. So you've got more options to make money - even though Amazon seems the better of the options. Chitika, Widgetbucks and other affiliate programs are even more creative ways to cash in.

That said, I'm not feeling the new EPN Quality click deal so much. To date my clicks have been worth 1 cent on several days, then 3 cents on several days. Would I prefer 3 cent clicks over someone buying an Amazon associates product to give me a 4% or 6% commission...I think you know the answer to that my friends..

So get started on making your way towards Christmas profits. It's not too late to start finding a way to profit from the 2009 season, and even preparing a website for the 2010 season and beyond!

1 comment:

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